The Paradine Case [DVD] [1947]

The film is not without considerable merit. The witholding of truth until the denoument scenes is well scripted, the impact of the case on the central characters meticulously and realistically plotted and, as always, taking central stage in the emotional impact of the film. Gregory Peck in particular turns in a marvellous performace as a man so deluded by love that he drives himself to the point of self-destruction. His sweaty, defeated abandonment of his case is a painful, draining scene to watch - just as it should be.

The director's visual flair is obvious in some scenes - the ominous face of Mrs Paradine in her bedhead at the family home, the down-looking and through-bars shots of the conversations in the prison - but largely the action is supressed by the static courtroom and home scenes, so unreminiscent of Hitchcock's later assertion that is the movement of the camera that moves the audience. This film is _so_ still that at some points one cannot feel it at all.

The impassioned speech of Gay, instructing her husband to save Mrs Paradine so that she should not lose him, would in a later Hitchcock film be a suble and dramatic moment, but here it is just melodramatic. The cut glass English voices and imposing 'darlings' in every other sentence of personal dialogue leave you yearning for Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman - the Liverpudlian and the Swede - pretending to be American in 'Notorious,' with it's sharp, cutting dialogue and economical emotiveness.

Of course, some of the restlessness and dissatisafaction that the film imposed upon me was entirely intended by the director. In order to empathise with the helplessness of Gay's situation we must feel her helplessness andpassivity through the stillness and coldness of the domestic scenes. The emotional deflation you feel by the end of the film mirrors the nature of Keane's experience.

This I could accept if I felt the conclusion of the film fitting to the content, but in this case Gay's blind devotion left me cold. In 'Brief Encounter' - not an obvious partner to this film but a comparable emotional journey - Laura's eventual surrender of her lover in favour of her husband and children was a hard considered sacrifice. Here Tony Keane surrenders his would-be lover because he discovers that she's not a nice woman, and his wife welcomes him back into her arms without question, comment or rebuke.

There is something rather sinister about Gay's mothering of Tony in the last scene - her insistence for example that he needs to shave - however. Instead of being the rewarded heroine and reformed man that they were supposed to be, it became a strange cross between the chauvanistic presumption that a woman will forgive a man any infidelity for love and the belittling of a man by a woman's calculating iciness.

From her insistence that Tony should defend Mrs Paradine even when its outcome was obvious to her her emotional manipulation and withholding of sex as ameans of punishment Gay becomes a sinister figure and Tony a pathetic one, robbing the film of any identifiable sympathetic character, except perhaps the relatively minor Anton or the dead Colonel Paradine. Intentional perhaps on Hitchcock's part, but hard for an audience to appreciate on an emotional level. Watching the film for me was an academic exercise in filmaking rather than the moving and involving process that watching a Hitchcock film normally is.

All in all a good film as an indicator of the evolution of Hitchcock's style and thematic interests, but not a great Hitchcock film. If you want emotional denial and duty watch 'Brief Encounter' - one of the greatest British movies of the era. If you want to see Gregory Peck in a stunning courtroom drama watch 'To Kill A Mockingbird.' The fan of Hitchcock - and I count myself among that rank - will watch the film and appreciate it on some level, but for the novice I would recommend a more accessible and compelling introduction to the master. This one may leave you strangely flat.